The web is a competitive place to do business, no doubt about it. There are literally millions of websites, each vying for the attention of the web surfing public. While the internet provides businesses with a global marketplace which never closes and allows access to a nearly limitless number of potential customers, it can be hard to stand out from the crowd and be noticed. You know that your website is user friendly and your product will sell itself - this is all well and good, but you need to let consumers know about your business or you'll never even make your first sale.
There are a lot of different ways you can go about promoting your website. There is of course search engine optimization, which will make your website easier to find by using Google and other search engines. Every website should do this; but there's no time to go into detail on all of the possible SEO strategies in this article. However, SEO alone is not enough. You need to find other ways to reach consumers.
Your business can choose to use PPC (pay per click) ads. These can work well to get visitors to your site and is cost effective (since you only pay when someone actually clicks your link and visits your site). However, this can still be an expensive way to produce targeted traffic. Especially if yours is a new internet based business with little to no marketing budget, using PPC advertising can be prohibitively expensive.
There is also the option of using information marketing techniques such as article marketing. This is a low cost option which can get traffic to your site - however, there is the problem that writing all of the content you need to produce a really large amount of traffic can take up an awful lot of your time - something which you don't have as the proprietor of a business. Every second that you're not reaching potential customers, you can bet that your competition is spending reaching them.
Then there is the most cost effective method of all - email marketing, Sending an email takes little time and costs nothing; it also takes very little time to write an email message. The problems is that if you start sending email to thousands of people you may be branded as a spammer - how can you get around this? The answer is to send your email to people who have already opted in to receive such email. Building your own email lists can take a considerable amount of time (since you have to get people to your site before you can even begin building your own list).
Fortunately, there are services out there which allow you to access lists of people who have already agreed to receive email; the best of these services even have software which you can access through your browser; this makes sending your branded email blasts quick and easy. This can make the task of starting to bring in traffic to your site, making sales and building your brand easier for web based businesses such as yours
